In the arena of sex trafficking, the players were always the same: a member or trusted aide of the parcel’s family; the agent who dealt in parcels, commonly known as the “dalal”; and finally the brothel owner. These were the constants, the trio that worked in perfect harmony like stars aligned in the heavens, constellations producing the same effect: a brilliant explosion of pain.
For the parcel, that pain was now just a bud, a promise of days to come, and no one knew this better than Madhu. She placed the ladder against the wall. The ceiling wasn’t that high; five rungs were all that was required to get her there. She pushed the wooden panel up with her palm and slid it across. She had definitely gained some weight since she’d last been here. Her waist barely fit through the opening now, and a couple of rough edges scraped her belly.
She had entered the hollow space that would become her operating chamber for the next while. It was still dark in here, but she could already detect the parcel’s movements—those hurried, useless movements. As always, there was a small flashlight near the right-hand corner of the loft. She groped for it but did not switch it on.
Madhu knew that the moment she pushed that switch, she would be in charge of the face she saw. Those eyes would be hers, that brain hers, even the smallest flitter of fear that darted across the parcel’s face like a bird in the sky.
But it wasn’t time yet. First, Madhu ran her hands along the cage bars. The ring that she wore rattled against them slowly: rat…tat…tat…The gaps in time were deliberate, so slow as to make the parcel wonder if they were even real. The dust in the loft made Madhu sniffle, but she did not sound like a person taking in breaths; it was more a reptilian crackle, like the way light bulbs sometimes hissed when hot. Her grip on the flashlight grew harder. For a brief moment, she closed her eyes, almost in prayer, because she knew that the next time she opened them, she would be using light, that most beautiful of things, to destroy.
Most of the young girls Madhu had seen were from Nepal, and a majority of them had not even heard of Bombay. There was one girl, years ago, who had not known what India was. Her village had been so tiny, so remote, she had no clue that there was anything beyond it. She lost her mind in only a few days.
When it came to the opening of a parcel, Madhu did not believe in the conventional approach wherein the madam and a couple of prostitutes pinned the parcel down to a bed while the customer broke her in. The parcels momentarily turned into eels, the terror electric, until their muscles went limp. There was no doubt that this was the quickest method, and it required minimal effort on the brothel owner’s part, but Madhu surmised that in the long run it was counterproductive. The sudden breaking in dislodged the parcels so badly that they teetered on the edge of madness for years, and some clients had a problem with sleeping with what they thought were mental patients.
Madhu’s approach was subtle. She knew that the instilling of fear in a parcel was a moot point, since the girl had been catapulted thousands of kilometres away from family and landed in a cage. Fear was essential, but it had to be built upon. It had to be layered, over time, like wet cement, until it solidified and ended up as the very foundation of the parcel’s being. Then Madhu would be the only one who could help ease it. The conventional method was not only barbaric, it also damaged the goods to the point where mending was impossible.
Madhu took a breath, then blasted the parcel with light. The parcel huddled, her back against the cage bars, trying to find space where there was none. She was exerting pressure against the cage bars, but Madhu knew that the more you pushed, the more things closed in on you—and this was one of the rules the parcel would have to understand, one of several rules that the cages taught its newborns.
The girl seemed to be about ten years old.
Her hair, parted in the centre, ponytailed on either side, was pressed to her head with a healthy dose of oil. Tiny earrings dotted each lobe. Her eyebrows were long, but her lashes normal. Healthy cheeks, typical of Nepali girls, but not too puffy. Skin the colour of brown rice. Madhu could not discern the tint of her eyes because her gaze was fixed to the floor. Her nostrils flared; the tightness in her lungs would be doing that.
The parcel, Madhu decided, was at that stage where she could grow into anything.
Her looks were ordinary enough not to promise any celestial blooming, but at the same time, she was…not pretty, but calm. No, perhaps calm wasn’t it.
She was clean. Yes, clean. Not in a soap-scrubbed way, but her skin, her shins. No scars left by childhood games or boils, no chicken pox marks on her face. The place under her eyes was sunken, but that was to be expected. One hour in this cage was enough to do that. There were no signs of beating on her. The way she sat, crouched, suggested that there were no internal wounds either. No bruised ribs or swollen kidneys. Madhu was no doctor, but this much she could tell. Internal damage had a way of pouring out: suddenly the eyes would flinch or the feet would twitch. This one sat reasonably still. Not too still, though, because that part hadn’t come yet.
Madhu had always resented these virgin girls. These yet-to-flower kalis were the reason eunuchs had been sculpted in the first place—that and God gifting hermaphrodites to mothers. The Almighty, caught in the throes of some divine nasha, occasionally did the job only half right by giving a boy child a penis the size of a seed or, in a moment of misplaced generosity, bestowing both a penis and vagina. Who knows what he smoked up there; if that formula could somehow be obtained, Kamathipura’s opium dens would rise from the ashes again.
In being asked to be this parcel’s caretaker, Madhu felt the weight of history repeating itself. Throughout the ages, eunuchs had served as protectors of harems, rakhwalas of precious vaginas that meant the world to the men in power. If other men had been left in charge when kings went to war, by the time they came back, chooth-walls would have been ruptured beyond repair by guards, cooks, gardeners, court jesters. So the eunuch had a place. Some even rose to the position of high-ranking government officials, or served as confidantes to members of royalty. The severing of their penises meant that they were severed from their families as well, rendered unfit for society, which made them subservient to just one master—as Madhu was to gurumai—loyal to a fault, out of helplessness. However, that same loyalty afforded them a level of prestige. Eunuch slaves were status symbols, exchanged as gifts between noblemen, or demanded as part of the war-spoils when a kingdom was lost. To this day, hijras were exchanged between hijra leaders. When Madhu was at her sexual zenith, such was her demand that she had almost been bartered away to another guru, but she had begged and pleaded with gurumai not to trade her. Gurumai would have made a fat profit from the trade, but she gave in to her star hijra’s histrionics. It was an act of generosity gurumai never allowed Madhu to forget.
But now, Madhu reflected, history had been perverted. In this cramped loft, there were no kings, only the kingdom of Kamathipura, and this parcel might be worth protecting, but Madhu’s function was to protect her and keep her safe until it was time to not protect her—history made topsy-turvy.
Moreover, the moment at which Madhu would have to let go of this parcel was not in her hands. Unlike a fruit that tasted hard and bitter if eaten before it was ready, a parcel’s ripeness depended not on the state of the parcel, but on the one who tasted her.
Madhu knew that Padma already had a buyer for this parcel, someone who was eager to pay a bomb for a virgin child—which made this parcel different from the others who arrived in Kamathipura. This parcel had been commissioned. Padma had been very clear that this one was true maal, a real virgin. Normally, when clients were told that a girl was seal-pack, it wasn’t the case. The girl had already been broken, but because she had not yet been sold on the market, she was still considered virginal and was presented as such to clients. In reality, she had been raped repeatedly by the agent during transport, on the train itself. How fitting, thought Madhu, that this was done in the cargo compartment, because the word maal literally meant “cargo” or “commodity.” The girl had been bought for a price and was no longer human. She was being converted into cheez—a thing to be consumed.
A parcel that had been opened on the way was sold at a higher price because it had already been tamed. The brothel madam would not have to go through the trouble of disciplining it, of having it opened. That was a headache.
This parcel’s case was different. She would not be taken in the brothel itself; something more rare would occur. She would be transported to someone’s home or to a hotel room nearby. That was why Madhu was being employed. She would act as the carrier. The parcel needed to be packaged in such a way that it looked like it belonged in Kamathipura. And who better than a hijra to undertake the task of transformation?
The parcel raised her head toward Madhu and then looked down again. Madhu turned the flashlight off, but she was not ready to make herself visible. Not yet. The parcel was murmuring something, mumbling away, her jaws hardly able to open. Words had no weight; they were as weightless as the motes of dust that stood in silvery columns under dangling light bulbs. Madhu’s aim in this first meeting between herself and the parcel was simple: to share the same physical space. There was no need for talk. When two bodies met, raw truth was exchanged.
And the truth was that a ten-year-old girl had been sold into slavery.
Madhu took one last look at the parcel and went down the trap door. That was enough for now. As she placed the ladder back next to the bicycle, she pondered the meaning of magic. Magic wasn’t about making things appear out of nowhere. Any amateur could do that. Magic was to make what was real disappear. To wipe out from existence. To turn against God.
He creates, thought Madhu. I erase.
Madhu walked through the lanes of Kamathipura: Lane Fourteen, Lane Thirteen, Lane Twelve…She descended deeper and deeper into the core of her settlement. The streets were rough cement, eaten and dug out, but the foundation of their hardness had been laid years ago, in the 1800s, when the first prostitutes wafted through them, danced and spun around, and eventually collapsed, only to be replaced by other bodies. Next, the criminals came. Once the working girls had made the place unacceptable to society, it became the perfect hideout for thieves, goons, small-time smugglers, and young men with moons in their eyes looking to make their mark in the criminal underworld. While they hid in the shadows, there was always the fold of a woman’s underwear to play with. If a thief’s hand got too restless, itched for a lock to break, he could slide it up a thigh or two during his hiatus. Slowly, the respectable families started moving out of the area and only the prostitutes and “kamathis” remained, the artisans and labourers from whom the place got its name. The families that had respect but no means to move out had to stuff handkerchiefs in their mouths whenever someone asked where they lived, because the assumption was that if you lived in Kamathipura, you were cheap, you were easy, you had flies coming out of your mouth when you yawned.
But gurumai had taught Madhu that this place did have one saving grace. What Kamathipura offered its babies, no other locale in the city could. To any new entrant, gurumai always gave a brief history of the place, and then the moral: “A child of Foras Road does not have ambitions. It does not seek love. It does not want. It does not beg for happiness like normal human beings do. That is our strength.”
When Madhu was a young hijra, thread by thread gurumai had woven a tapestry so fine that Madhu was mesmerized by her gall, the sheer glory of a reject rejecting the rest of the city. But Madhu had not realized that gurumai was talking about the children of female prostitutes; she was not referring to hijras. Hijras were never born in Kamathipura. They were always from somewhere else. They were immigrants, and, as such, they were morons with dreams. And although hijras may have been adopted by Kamathipura, they were confined to a two-storey building known as the House of the Hijra. It was the unofficial womb for members of the third gender, and it was Madhu’s home. For bodies like Madhu’s that were neither here nor there, Hijra House offered a fixed address for the soul.
Before India’s independence, a lot of white memsahibs who stayed in the area employed hijras to do the daily cooking and cleaning. Over time, the hijras became more than just servants—they were confidantes, trusted aides, not just to the white women, but to the rich Indian women as well. When India finally broke free of the British and the white women went back to England—and some of the Indian women moved elsewhere—they gifted their homes to the hijras. That was how Ramabai Chawl and the area surrounding it had become a hijra haven. All this Madhu had been fed by gurumai—stories sequestered into the very fabric of her being to keep her proud and loyal, and fearful.
By now, Madhu had reached her asylum. The moment she turned right from the laundry, the darkness took on a different scent. There were no street lights in this lane; it lived in the dark. At the beginning of the lane, the carrom players, mainly steelworkers from the adjoining mill, sat on wooden stools, making shots at impossible angles, while their cigarette smoke created a hazy cloud that climbed the walls of the public urinal and disappeared toward the roof, where Devyani, six foot three inches of human draped in black, straggly hair falling to the waist, stood in a sari. Every single night, Devyani smoked ganja and planted herself on the roof of the public urinal. Unlike a lighthouse, which emits a blinking signal, Devyani merged into the sky, appearing only when there was trouble. Then her teeth would flash as she descended onto the ground with alarming speed to prevent some macho lund from ill-treating Roomali—Roomali, who at this moment was leaning against the wall of the public urinal, wooing her next client. With its layers of makeup, her face was a sudden shot of white in the dark, and the red lips made her look clownish until she began to sweet talk. Then there was no mistaking her wiles. She wore shorts, which was a violation of the hijra code, but as long as she brought in some coin it didn’t matter to gurumai.
Madhu took the stairs and was greeted by dour-faced Sona. Gurumai always teased Sona that she must have been a wrinkle in her past life, specifically a wrinkle on someone’s arse, which is why she always made that stinky face. But it was not a past life that Sona could not shake off; she was trying to forget her brothers in this life and how they had treated her when she was Suresh. She had run away from a small town in Gujarat when she was sixteen. Her brothers had followed Suresh to drag him back home, but when gurumai told them that he had already been castrated, they spat on the ground and left without even meeting with him. Suresh hadn’t been castrated. It was gurumai’s way of showing Suresh that family ties meant nothing. “See how quickly they turned,” she told him. To this day, Sona could not get over it; she was always replaying some stupid reconciliation scene in her movie-projector mind.
In the hall, the TV was on but no one was watching. Tarana and Anjali were stuck together as usual, glued to each other by a common bitchiness. They whispered all day and night, bringing bits of gossip from all corners of the city and churning them out after adding their own giddy bile. Tarana and Anjali were among the lucky. Their progression from man to hijra had served them well. Their lips were full, their lashes long, and there was hardly a trace of hardness in their faces. As well, their breasts had grown, and for this more than anything, Madhu wished them slow, painful deaths. Anjali had taken hormone injections and was now reaping the benefits. Tarana didn’t need injections. Her breasts just grew with the randomness and unreasonableness of tumours. Madhu too had experienced growth. After her castration, it had surged through her like a beautiful promise and had enervated her. But somewhere down the line her breasts had failed to fulfill her as she had thought they would. Madhu believed that the reason they had never fully come into their own was her own disappointment. It had stopped them from flowering.
The others had just finished eating dinner. Madhu had already eaten with Gajja, but she did not want to tell them that. Her sisters were jealous of her friendship with Gajja. It was rare for a man to devote himself to a hijra even after their relationship had ceased to be sexual.
Besides gurumai, the only fellow hijra whom Madhu could confide in, the only one she had real feelings for, was Bulbul. She had been Madhu’s friend since the day they met, but she never listened to a single piece of advice that Madhu gave her. Tonight Bulbul was seated solemnly on a chair in front of a mirror, combing her hair. Madhu had told her not to do that in front of the others, because they sniggered at her. As if to prove her point, when the comb became stuck in the frizz of Bulbul’s locks, Anjali pounced on her.
“Traffic jam in your hair?” she asked.
Bulbul was getting old—nearing sixty now—and the more she combed her hair and put makeup on, the easier it was for her to look like a mistake. Madhu had tried explaining this—subtly at first, then with the audacity of a truck horn—but Bulbul just didn’t get it. Her name itself, Bulbul, now seemed cruel. She loved to sing, but the voice that had once been passable was now hoarse, no longer fit for singing at weddings and childbirths. It was more for selling pots and pans at cheap prices. “Comb your hair when it’s wet,” Madhu had told Bulbul a hundred times, but Bulbul was so afraid of catching a cold, she continued to make her hair desert dry. It always looked as though it had taken the wind as prisoner. She had become fragile and paranoid, but vanity had not left her. She was obsessed with her looks and loved to pose for tourists. She never took money for a photograph. “I will lose my looks if I take money for this face,” she said in earnest, another admission made aloud that had become a catchphrase for the others in her absence.
Bulbul lifted her chin in an attempt to tighten her skin, but the only result was the tautness of another jibe from Anjali. Madhu shot a glare in Anjali’s direction and she cooled down, but it was too late: Bulbul was hurt and made a dash to the toilet. She would urinate, no doubt, but she urinated tears—that’s how sensitive she was.
Tarana and Anjali went over to where Bulbul had been sitting. They smiled naughtily at Madhu, as if to say, “Allow us at least this much.” When Madhu nodded, they quickly grabbed Bulbul’s mobile phone and started going through her photo gallery. These were photos Bulbul had taken of herself, and she thought no one else knew about them. Now even Sona rushed to the phone to join in, and the giggles began.
The mobile phone’s flash had made Bulbul look grotesque at times, with the dip of her lip trying to twist into a smile, one eye slightly smaller than the other, wrinkle upon wrinkle showing itself through layers of pancake makeup. Each image was that of a human being deluding herself, and it made Madhu feel wrinkled as well, shrunken and spurned. Then Anjali flicked to a new photo, one Madhu had never seen before, of Bulbul with a fake cockatoo on her shoulder. Sona was the first to burst. She tried not to be so shameless in her laughter, but all of them, including Madhu, began to break like eggshells. Anjali barely had the strength to put the phone back in its place before Bulbul returned from the toilet. They tried to control themselves but instead collapsed to the floor in a cackling heap, and Madhu knew then that Bulbul would give her an earful that night. She’d know that they were laughing at her and would want to know why, and Madhu would have to make something up. But for now the photographs had served their purpose: they gave Bulbul the illusion of beauty and the rest of them a chance to be children again—brash and hurtful, in love with laughter.
There were two types of moans in Kamathipura.
First, the obvious ones, from customers shivering above bodies on rent, letting go for a few seconds with one aaah. Second, the aaahs of suffering: voices rising in pain, softer than the ecstasy of customers but more fevered. Because Madhu slept on the floor at the foot of gurumai’s bed, it was the second type of moan she had to contend with. Tonight, gurumai was trying to clear her throat of phlegm and was calling out Madhu’s name. But she was not awake. Gurumai clutched a small pillow, gripped it in her sleep. Madhu rubbed gurumai’s feet. The warmth of her palms on the soles had always soothed gurumai, and now the contortions on her face eased slowly, until it was time for another dream to own her.
On the floor, Madhu’s phone blinked and vibrated. It was Gajja.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Home,” she whispered.
“Come to Lund Ki Dukaan.”
“I can’t…”
“You have to. The Mary’s here and Salma’s in top form.”
The mention of the Mary lifted Madhu. Every so often, a female Samaritan came from the calm meadows of the middle class with free condoms and advice. These were well-meaning women, but it was hard for them to understand that when you have lived in Kamathipura for as long as Madhu had, there were things more fearful than becoming a pojeetive. Still, along with a minor dose of empathy, they offered major entertainment. They had good Christian hearts and their attempts at helping allowed them to sleep well at night. This was consoling to Madhu: most of the time the existence of people like her tended to disturb others; at least she managed to help these Marys get some sleep.
She gave gurumai’s feet a final rub.
It was well past midnight now, and Madhu thought of Tarana and Anjali, the two young stars of the brothel, on duty right now in another section of Hijra House, sucking and cooing like ravenous doves. They were always the last to sleep, at four in the morning, after they had been taken “royally,” as they liked to say. But the less lucrative hijras, the ones gurumai thought of as charity cases, had already called it a night and were sleeping around gurumai’s bed as though she were a planet pulling them toward her. Sona was snuggled up to the corner of a wall, mistaking it for the nook of a lover’s underarm. Sona did not take clients or lovers. She only performed at weddings and knew in her heart that with her bushy eyebrows and guttural voice, she was too unattractive for sex work. Bulbul was facing heavenward, her hair split on either side of the pillow in uneven streams. She’d gladly snuggle up to anyone who would have her, but takers were few. The bodies of Devyani and Roomali lay contorted on the floor, as on most nights. They thought so much about the past that it took them a long time to fall asleep, only to wake up exhausted, singed by their own recollections. These were the seven chelas of gurumai, who were allowed to serve their mistress by staying in Hijra House. They were lonely disciples whose destinies were stitched together by the thread of being born different—and what a life they had made, all runaways landing in each other’s arms. Madhu left them to their sleep, grateful to her sisters and gurumai for providing some familiarity, some cement, in a life that would have otherwise been a mudslide.
Down the stairs she went with the excitement of a child, and before she knew it, she was stepping in the potholes and dog shit of her locality with abandon, toward the Dick Shop. The name was Gajja’s invention. He had wanted to paint a sign that said “Lund Ki Dukaan,” but the management preferred a low profile. Still, they appreciated the gesture. The Dick Shop was an old Irani restaurant that had been converted into a small cinema. It was no substitute for the Alexandra, but at least it lived. It was illegal during the day and grew even more illegal at night. Starting at noon, for fifteen rupees only, the shop screened the latest blockbusters on a large TV. Most of Kamathipura had seen Don 2 before most of Mumbai, and when Don 2 was released, Don 2 was all that played—from noon to three, three to six, six to nine, and from nine to midnight. The afternoons and evenings might have belonged to King Khan, but the nights went to the porn stars. At the stroke of midnight, flies opened and cocks emerged, on screen and off. Sometimes it was foreign porn, white men and women glowing like aliens, so clean, so hairless, so pink. Sometimes the South Indians took over, the dusky bodies and hairy vaginas having their own draw. Madhu had never understood porn. It was like watching the same news item over and over.
The owner of Porno Parlour—its other, English, name—had an understanding with the NGOs and cops. Once in a while, they would allow the Marys—in Kamathipura they were all called Marys—to hold workshops and address the audience, because the crowd that came here would ordinarily never attend an NGO gathering. At the moment, some poor Mary, a new recruit, would be getting the fright of her life, because Salma was in gear. A new Mary, with her broken Hindi, hiding behind her cross, was always a sight to behold.
“Come on!” said Gajja. “You’re missing everything.”
He dragged Madhu inside so forcefully that Madhu almost missed a step in the dark. The room stank of sweat and Dettol. The sermon was on. Gajja had saved a seat for Madhu on the wooden bench closest to the entrance, one of many that had been stolen from the convent school nearby. The benches were perfect for Porno Parlour because they had desks attached to them, which served as a cover for masturbating men and prevented them from squirting the person in front. When the school complained about the theft, the owner of Porno Parlour offered to return them, but not before casually mentioning to the cop on duty that the desks had been “spoiled due to excitement.” The school suggested that the owner consider the benches a donation.
Thankfully, the new Mary was not demonstrating the proper way for a woman to make a client wear a condom. Everyone in the audience had been taught that a hundred times, but still someone from the crowd, a gent usually, would say, “Show me, show me!”
Madhu spotted Salma two rows ahead of her. She was ominously quiet.
The Mary was showing a short video, and with every frame, Madhu could tell Salma’s fuse was getting shorter. Gajja had already filled Madhu in: Salma had been asked to calm down by the Mary and her male colleague, and had been on the verge of being thrown out, but Salma had apologized, which she always did, especially when she didn’t mean it.
As statistics poured onto the screen, a man’s voice emphasized the numbers in a cheap, theatrical tone: A decade ago, there were one lakh prostitutes in Kamathipura alone. Now there are only twenty thousand.
Salma clapped for that one, dwindling numbers, but it was still her moment, after all. The Mary glared at her.
On average, each sex worker services ten men in one night.
Salma nodded her head vehemently. “Corr-ect,” she said, in English, to the Mary. “This phillum is showing the reality.”
Madhu did not understand why they were being forced to watch the statistics. Such things were a showcase for outsiders to induce pity and donations. Maybe she had missed something earlier.
Kamathipura is the second largest red-light area in Asia.
“What?” said Salma. “We are not first?”
As the facts continued to parade across the screen, the audience grew bored—cows chewing on grass. Madhu felt further and further removed from the video the Mary was playing for them. Thankfully, the voice soon faded away into the even more humiliating sound of a sitar wailing.
“Any questions?” asked the Mary. “Any questions about precautions? It’s your life. It’s worth fighting for.”
Salma put her hand up like a good schoolgirl. “If a client hates to use condoms and starts slapping me around when I insist, what should I do? Do you have any precautions against that?”
“Well…,” said the Mary. “You can come and speak to us privately about that.”
“But I’m asking you now. If my cunt is public, why should my questions be private?”
“We can counsel you accordingly,” said the Mary. “We can—”
But the man in the first row interrupted her. “Put on the triple X, yaar!”
Fed up with the sermonic turn the night had taken, he wanted to skip the previews and go straight to the hard-core porn. Madhu was not surprised. In single- and double-X movies, there was a storyline and no intercourse. That was for amateurs. Even Gajja found single- and double-X films redundant. “What’s the use of a story?” he had asked Madhu. “We know where the cock ends up!”
“Yes, yes,” echoed another man. “Put on the triple! Stop this AIDS phillum! You are trying to scare us! AIDS is not real!”
Ah, there it is, thought Madhu. There was always that rare coconut, always male, who believed that AIDS was a phantom, something religious people and the government had concocted to restrict the enjoyment of sex. Even if a pojeetive worm existed, the thinking went, if one drank a soda or anything fizzy immediately after intercourse, it would flush out the worm through the urine. Madhu had heard men speak this way time and again. She thought it best to let them believe in the power of soda.
She could sense Salma getting hot again, burning with the desire to speak. Two other people had disrupted the proceedings, so there was no danger she would be singled out. She turned around, faced the audience, and took off: “These bhenchoth randis come here to teach me—me—about sex? I have swallowed more sperm than they have drunk water!”
Gajja laughed. He loved Salma’s tirades. He called her the greatest orator in the city. If only some political party would recruit her. No one else could speak with such candour.
Salma’s truth had landed flush on the Mary’s face.
“Chudayl, take your condoms, blow some air into them, and fly away from here,” Salma added with a flourish of her hand.
The Mary ignored her and waved a packet of condoms. “These are chocolate flavoured, so they will taste good,” she said.
“I hate chocolates,” said Salma softly, without anger.
The Mary ignored her.
“You’re not listening to me,” said Salma. “The last thing my father gave me before he sold me here was a chocolate.”
Madhu saw the way Salma suddenly quietened, going into a shell as though her head had become soft, as though the skull had turned to pulp at the mention of chocolate.
Madhu understood. Even Madhu had her chocolates—the things that reminded her of home, of people she had loved or had made the mistake of trusting. No matter where people were or what they were doing, their chocolates had a way of taking them back.
Madhu was ten. He lived with his parents and younger brother in a one-bedroom flat in a building called Shakti. It was 1984—an important year in his life. It was the year he made his first real friend, a boy named Taher, whose father owned a stationery shop just below the building. Taher and Madhu lived in Shakti and went to the same school, but until 1984 they rarely spoke. No one noticed Madhu except when he had to walk to the blackboard to spell out an English word. Mrs. Bhaskar loved to give them spelling tests.
“Who would like to spell obedient?”
“Who would like to spell continent?”
“Who would like to spell miracle?”
No one would, so the pupils were chosen randomly by Mrs. Bhaskar’s crooked finger. Her forefinger was malformed, bent permanently, and when she looked at one student and said, “You,” there was confusion because her finger was pointing in another direction. The students learned to look in her eyes to gauge correctly.
“You,” she said. “Yes, you, Madhu. Come here and spell canal.”
Madhu knew how to spell the word. He was sure he knew. But when he was halfway to the board, someone said, “He walks like a girl!”
Madhu froze. He just stood there in his short pants and felt as naked as a gushing river.
“Is there a reason you are standing in the middle of the class?” Mrs. Bhaskar asked.
Of course there was. He had been found out.
But Mrs. Bhaskar was so concerned about canal that Madhu’s feelings did not enter her mind. The minute Madhu resumed walking, the laughter became even louder because now he was trying not to walk like a girl. What resulted was a new kind of human being who tried not to sway, who became stiff and professorial. Madhu made it to the board, spelled the word, and fled to his seat. It was only when he sat down and read what he had written that he realized how scared he was. Instead of the word canal, he had written three others:
I am sorry.
His father had tried so hard to make him a boy. How could he fail at something he already was? Mrs. Bhaskar must have seen the pain in his face because she never called him back to spell anything. But the damage had been done. After that incident, Madhu tried not to walk much when other people were around.
The only person who showed him kindness that day was Taher. He did not look at Madhu but he did not laugh either. He was quiet even though the boy next to him was grinning.
That was enough consolation for Madhu.
A couple of weeks later, Taher took Madhu by surprise once again.
It was a Sunday morning and a cricket game was on. Five a side, the boys from Madhu’s building versus the richer ones from Navjeevan Society, the building opposite. For the past hour, Madhu had heard that wretched red rubber ball being thwacked around behind the building. The shouts of excitement only made Madhu feel more out of sync with life, and he sank to the floor. The hard tiles became an ocean in which he could drown. He imagined diving into the wet floor and resurfacing as an Apsara, a celestial being with whom he’d felt an immediate kinship when he’d encountered her in the Amar Chitra Katha comics. So he rose from his ocean bed to get some air, to show himself unabashedly to the fishermen and hunters and whoever else might be on shore at the time, without realizing that he was standing right by the kitchen window.
The minute Taher saw him, Madhu ducked out of sight.
Then he heard a boy’s mother call him home. There was a protest from Taher and the others that this boy was the only one left to bat, but the mother didn’t care and the son went home. Madhu heard the boys from Navjeevan shouting, “We won, we won, we won,” and then, “No double batting, no!” And then Madhu heard his name.
What had he done?
Taher called out his name a second time. “Come down and bat,” said Taher.
“What?”
“You’re on our team. Come down and bat.”
“But…”
“Come down, I said.”
Taher was so firm, so tough. And he wanted Madhu. It was this fact that had Madhu running for the stairs. His mother did not mind. She was, as usual, praying before the picture of Shiva with deadened devotion, but she managed to send him off with a smile. If only his father were home, Madhu thought, he would have been proud.
Someone explained the match situation to Madhu, but he wasn’t listening. The bat was too damn heavy and he had forgotten how to hold it even though his father had tried to teach him several times.
“We need four runs to win,” said Taher. “I hate these bastards. I want to win.”
Bastards. Yes, the entire lot of them. Anything for Taher.
The bowler came in. Madhu closed his eyes and thought of Kapil Dev, that great all-rounder, because his father loved Kapil. But this was no time for inspiration. It was a time for miracles.
Something connected.
Madhu sent the ball flying into a second-floor window. Glass shattered. It was a six; they had won. Taher jumped in celebration as the opposition skulked away, but Madhu stood there frozen, terrified that his father would have to pay for the broken glass. They were the poorest family in the building.
“Never mind,” said Taher. It was the window of his own flat, and he would never replace the glass because it was a symbol of victory.
Madhu’s head was spinning. He was associated with victory. He was a symbol. Taher thumped him on the back. Madhu thumped him back.
Then Taher smiled at Madhu. A soft breeze hit Taher’s cheeks and made him squint, and Madhu was overwhelmed with love. He tried to shake Taher’s hand to thank him profusely. But he ended up holding it instead—only for a second or two, but it felt like forever.
It was Monday by the time Madhu landed on earth again.
When he entered his classroom, he was not ashamed to walk. He walked to his seat and took his time. During the first recess, he waited for Taher to come over and say hello. He would have gladly accepted even a sneeze from Taher, but no word or gesture came his way. During the lunch break, he went outside and sat on his favourite tree branch. He ate his lunch here, alone, five days a week. The tree’s white branches were like tusks, and it was on this tree that he had started to like the feeling of something hard and solid between his legs.
“There’s our champion,” said Taher.
He had appeared suddenly, accompanied by Nitin and Sohail, neither of whom had ever before talked to Madhu.
“Hi,” said Madhu eagerly. He jumped off his branch. “Hi…” He had no idea what to say. Most of his conversations were with himself.
“I heard you smashed a huge six,” said Sohail.
“Yes, I broke his window,” said Madhu proudly, looking at Taher. “We really showed them, those Navjeevan bastards…” He forced the words off his tongue, feeling like a charlatan.
“You want to play with us again?” asked Taher.
Every cell in Madhu’s body wanted to refuse. Holding a bat again would only remind him of his disapproving father.
“Sure, I love cricket,” he said.
“Come with us,” said Taher. He put his arm around Madhu, and Madhu went electric. He could have given light to an entire slum.
“Where’s the bat and ball?” he asked.
“We don’t need one,” said Taher, and he pushed Madhu to the ground. Madhu wanted so much to believe that he had stumbled and caused his own fall. But he could not convince himself that Taher’s foot had landed on his stomach by accident. He squirmed in pain.
“Why did you hold my hand yesterday?” asked Taher.
Madhu wanted to answer, but he was drowning in two separate streams of tears coming down his cheeks. The drops from the right eye were because he was in physical pain; the ones from the left were because he had allowed himself to think that he had made a friend.
“Do you know that the boys from Navjeevan saw you hold my hand? I’m the bloody captain!”
“I’m sorry…I was only trying to shake it…”
Perhaps it was because he crawled away that Madhu was saved from being beaten further. But he understood something valuable as he hid under a bush for the next hour. He would not be allowed to walk tall, to make friends like normal boys did. He had been sent to this earth to grovel, to make his acquaintance with the worms and the weeds, and when he longed for company or support from the outside world, only a stray dog would show up, the way it had that day, raising its hind leg, showering upon that bush something pungent and acidic, preparing Madhu for the taste that his life would have in the years to come.
Gajja had passed out with his head on the desk at Porno Parlour. Madhu left him there and walked to Padma’s brothel with Salma. On the rare occasion that Padma was unwell, Salma ran the day-to-day activities of the place and was hoping to someday occupy a full-time managerial position. But until then, she continued to take whoever paid her.
Madhu understood the detachment that a prostitute required. After so many years of service, Salma had learned how to disassociate herself from her body. It was the same for Madhu. She remembered how once, when a man was inside her, she had seen both him and herself from a distance. She had been so outside herself she thought she had died. But she had come back into her body the minute he was done, and once again felt its agonies and petty complaints.
“This new parcel…when should I meet her?” asked Salma.
“Not yet. But we both have to be prepared. If she is to be transported, I am her adopted mother. But once she’s opened, you will be in charge of her. That’s what madam said.”
“Things are so complicated now. Before, there was no mother. I was just left in the dark. If the cops found me, they fucked me or took a bribe. It was so simple. Why is madam doing all this?”
“The cops are turning honest.”
“And I’m a virgin,” said Salma, “who has never even seen a cock.”
At 3:00 a.m., most of the sex workers were wrapping things up for the night. They sat on the brothel steps, lifting their hair to wipe the sweat off their necks. They looked like factory workers with aching muscles. Young men in tight jeans and spiky haircuts stood around motorcycles and spoke about their exploits, boasting about which prostitute they had slept with, or how many. Salma went up the stairs to join the snoring of several others. The women’s dreams would criss-cross in the dark, and they would all wake up at around noon, when the designated chai maker would prepare the morning brew.
Madhu climbed the stairs to the third floor, wondering if she should feed the parcel. She decided against it. It was too soon for her to provide any comfort. The first night was all about submission.
The parcel was crouched into a ball in the cage, more in a collapsed state of exhaustion than sleep. Even when Madhu aimed the flashlight at her, she did not move. Madhu felt disoriented as she studied the parcel. She would have to tread carefully with this one. Sometimes the parcels lost their minds sooner than expected. Sometimes they never came back. Some clients were okay with sleeping with a drugged doll; others were not.
The smell was very strong. The parcel had urinated in the cage. Madhu hated this part, the stripping away of all human dignity. But it had to be done. It was for the parcel’s own good. The more useless she felt, the more she would listen, and that would enable Madhu to get through to her. It would help Madhu save her from greater pains and indignities.
It was time for Madhu and the parcel to meet. Madhu rattled the cage bars with the flashlight. The parcel snapped awake, as though injected with adrenaline. She tried to sit up but her elbow gave way. Slowly, Madhu turned the flashlight away from the parcel and detected the stream of urine that had trickled toward a corner.
Most of these Nepali girls had never seen a hijra. Madhu had a flower in her hair, but she knew it did not make her softer. Through the cage bars, her face would look even more contorted—the blood-red lips, the jasmine in her hair failing to offset the manly face, the dark circles under her eyes only proving that she did not deserve sleep. Madhu knew that she did not need to act threatening. Her natural face was enough. She wished she could adjust the amount of light, make it softer, the way candles made even evil things glow and allowed one to find a glimmer of hope in them.
She quelled her shame and lit her own face in the flashlight’s beam. It had been years since she had done this. Years ago, her face had been pretty. It was different now but not meant to scare. She hated the line that she would speak next. She had to run the line in her head for a few seconds because her Nepali was very rusty. She knew it in bits and pieces, had picked it up from Roomali, her hijra sister from Nepal, and from the parcels of the past as well. But she was worrying needlessly. The moment she opened her mouth, the words just flowed.
“Now think about what you’ve done,” she told the parcel.
As she walked down the street a half-hour later, Madhu’s stomach growled. While the rest of Mumbai slept, Sukhlaji Street was awake. Some called 3:30 a.m. the wee hours of the morning, but for Madhu it was still night. A kind of pulse came from behind closed doors—the heartbeats of prostitutes thinking of their families, their faint, tiny breaths seeping through the cracks of windows, making the air staler with the same old sighs and longings. The slurred speech of an alcoholic tried to cross the street to reach the ears of another drunkard, and stray dogs covered with sores limped like handicapped angels, wondering why no one was bandaging their blisters. The city never slept—that is what people said time and again. It never slept, thought Madhu, because wounds were wide awake.
The opium dens of Sukhlaji Street had shut down ages ago, and the semi-transparent skeletons of the addicts who had once drifted through this area were long gone. Madhu had learned that no one died on opium; they became lighter. But then opium gave way to heroin, and suddenly men and women were turning white in the darkness, their veins freezing toward death. The new drug had proven to be too much happiness streaming through bodies not trained for it. Heroin had started to catch on when a man walked into the opium dens with a VCR and videocassette. His employers had filmed for the den owners how to use this drug, how to prepare it, how to inject it, how to push it into the body like a child going in, an abortion in reverse, hot and fresh, cooked to enter and die.
Now only one skeleton remained, but he was no addict.
He was called Maachis because he was matchstick thin, and he sold sweetmeats: warm, sticky gulab jamuns that melted in the mouth so fast, the tongue desperately tried to savour every bite, only to sing for more. For Madhu, they were a habit as addictive as heroin, and they were the last sweet thing left in her life. They had once been gurumai’s addiction as well. For years Madhu could hear gurumai slurping over gulab jamuns like some gluttonous thing in the dark. But since her health had started to wane, gurumai ate them only a couple of times a year, as a treat for surviving.
If it were not for the gulab jamun, Madhu might not have become a hijra, for she would never have met gurumai. And if it were not for her father, she would not have gone in the middle of the afternoon, in the scorching heat, to Geeta Bhavan to buy gulab jamuns. Madhu remembered the day well. “Sir,” as Madhu’s father was called by the students at Maharashtra College, had been correcting history papers all morning, occasionally mumbling to his wife that his intelligence had not been rewarded, because his brother, less educated than him, had become a successful businessman, and here he was, in a flat bought from his younger brother’s charity, a humiliation he would never recover from. He took his glasses off his nose and said to Madhu, “Get me some gulab jamuns.”
Madhu’s mother gave him the money. His father was never to be bothered with matters as trivial as money, although Madhu knew that was all he cared about. His mother would never buy anything for herself; she would save every rupee like it was a human life, and thank God she did, because it helped in times such as these, when her husband’s salary was a slow train, approaching at an agonizing pace. As Madhu went down the stairs, he imagined he was following an escape route or pathway to another land. He tried so hard not to think of himself as defective, but now, in his tenth year on earth, the heavens were speaking to him, saying, “You’re right to think that way. You leaked out of God’s palm; you slipped through the cracks.” To make things right, the gods in heaven had given his parents another child, a real son, who was now almost a year old. They doted on him obsessively, as though he was a combination of movie star and spiritual guru, when all he did was shriek and shit through the night. So in addition to his own imperfection, Madhu had been carrying his brother’s magnificence for the past year, and it was becoming too much to bear. The weight of his thoughts was so heavy it took him ages to cross the road to Geeta Bhavan.
He paid the man at the counter, wondering if he should stick his hand in the plastic bag and eat one there and then. The thought of going back to his father made him swallow two. He wiped his sticky hand on his shorts, and then he felt the urge to wipe his hand on his thigh. As he did, he felt a shadow fall over him—or maybe it was a breeze, or the promise of a breeze, only darker.
That mouth, those lips. That eternal pout.
The words that came out of that mouth flew toward Madhu with such purpose, they were unlike anything that had come his way until then.
“Kya, chickni.”
Hello, smooth one.
The mouth belonged to a tall man-woman in a sari, with hair parted in the centre, large gold earrings dangling from either ear, a nose flattening itself out, trying to cover as much area as possible, and lips—Madhu could not get over those red swollen lips.
She grinned, and so did the two others beside her. Madhu took one look at them and dropped the bag of gulab jamuns and ran. He heard raucous laughter before it was drowned out by the horn of an Ambassador that almost ran over him. In his hurry to cross the road, he caused a chaotic tangle of cars and motorcycles and a string of abuses. By the time Madhu got to the other side, the apparition was already there, waiting for Madhu with the bag of gulab jamuns.
“Chickni,” she said again, “don’t be afraid.”
She bent down to give Madhu the gulab jamuns, but not before she slid her hand in the bag, picked one, and popped it in her mouth. Madhu could smell her breath. Her lips were red from betel juice, ruder and flashier than any lipstick.
Madhu did not know it then, but this would be his gurumai. His mai-baap, his “mother-father,” his shelter, his solace, his destruction.
For once, the street Madhu lived on had not been mundane. His whole body was throbbing wildly. He had seen these apparitions before, but never up close.
By the time he rang his own doorbell, he felt pleased to see his father.
But from that moment on, gurumai never left him. Her words hummed in his head with the authority of an anthem, as though Madhu were a country and the song had been composed just for him.
Chickni. She had referred to Madhu in the female tense. It made Madhu feel strangely empowered. His ten-year-old body felt long and powerful and free, and this so scared him that he wanted to sleep between his mother and father but his request fell upon deaf ears because the baby had that spot. He felt a beautiful rage against his brother and stayed up all night begging Shiva to make his mother’s nipples poisonous.
It had now been thirty years since that day when Madhu first met gurumai. In that time, the shopkeepers from his childhood, who had sold smuggled Rado watches and playing cards with naked women on them, had died; police commissioners had come and gone; and the children of Kamathipura had grown up to become drivers and watchmen. In that time, Madhu had stopped wearing men’s underwear and started wearing panties, and the very buildings that housed the brothels were in danger of being reduced to rubble, made into large vacant spaces ready to be plundered by real estate developers. Bulldozers would soon be showing up on doorsteps like metal gangsters, like great conquerors, but one thing remained constant: the fear and exhilaration and confusion that Madhu had felt that day. There was no single word to describe what he had felt when he and gurumai met, just as there is no one word you could say to a mother whose child has just died. There were many words and they were all useless. And when Madhu felt useless, as she did right now, she put her hand into the plastic packet and slipped a gulab into her mouth.